google things that will shock

Its founders’ mission back in 1995 — aside from not being evil — was to implement a page ranking system based on the rules of academic citation. In academia, citations are like currency. Your publication will stand in higher esteem the more other publications cite it. As graduate students at Stanford University, Larry Page and Sergey Brin created their search algorithm with the idea of ranking pages based on how often other pages “cite” them — or, in this case, link back to them.